At 6:41 AM -0700 7/18/96, Clay Olbon II wrote:

There was a pretty long piece on the evening news on using the internet for long distance and how much money can be saved. Even had several demos of intercontinental phone calls. The disappointing aspect was they didn't mention PGPfone (although if they had, I'm sure child pornographers and terrorists would have been mentioned as well :-)

There's something fundamental going on here beneath the surface. Surprisingly, a recent item (maybe the one you reported) on this suggests that the big phone companies are trying to use this phenomenon rather than stop it. I think it was AT&T who announced that they had web software that improved the quality of such internet voice calls. Surprisingly constructive, in contrast to the coalition of small phone companies screaming for the FCC to "stop it". The FCC has wisely said they're not going to act right now because it could kill an incipient new technology. This is the rankest speculation on my part, but could some of the bigger, smarter phone company cum internet providers have done some serious analysis and concluded that we're moving away from distance-based rates for voice calls. Might they even have examined where we'll be in the next ten years (with ADSL, etc.) and decided that the network technology and simple market economics makes fixed charges per "line" more profitable to them than metered usage? Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part, but some of the bigger actors are starting to behave in a surprisingly counter-intuitive (based on the way we stereotype them) fashion on this topic. David